Technological advances in communication architectures have impacted consumers in many ways. With an increasing number of consumers becoming “connected” by either owning cell phones, pagers, facsimile (fax) machines, or linking with global communication networks, the potential for reaching these consumers with advertising becomes an increasing reality. For example, a consumer who has a fax machine connected at their home or office can receive a random call any time of day or night, which eventually results in a piece of paper in the output tray relating to some unsolicited product or service. Similarly, consumers who connect to and browse the most popular global communication network, the Internet, are bombarded with advertising on nearly every web page they view. The potential return on investment in advertising dollars from these technological applications is enormous. Therefore, the capability of placing advertising in front of the consumer as often as possible is a most desirable goal. In this fast-paced society, the capability of capturing the attention of a customer for only a few moments can provide a significant return on advertising investment dollars. Factor in the capability of focusing the advertising to the individual customer, and the potential for return increases even more.
One area ripe for this innovative application is fuel dispensers. When a customer pulls in to a gasoline station to fuel-up, several minutes of “idle” time are available for advertising to the customer. However, existing fuel dispenser systems are limited in that either the advertising is fixed to poles and the fuel pump chassis where the attention span of the customer is such that he or she may notice the advertisements only in a passing glance. More sophisticated fuel dispenser systems play audio messaging or a rudimentary video presentation to hopefully capture the customer's attention for more business. Furthermore, the implementation and maintenance of such systems is costly in that changes are manually intensive to replace placards and to change the programming piped to the fuel pump. It is therefore desirable to provide a fuel dispenser advertising system which targets the individual customer in order capture his or her attention, and is easy to implement and maintain.